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This week's win brought to a close the seeding rounds of the Consolation Cup and I'm pleased to report the first of our objectives has been achieved, winning each of our 6 games to finish 6-2 and rank 13th in the seedings the third highest of the 6-2 teams and the highest of the Asian based teams.
This has drawn us a first round knock out game against Japan, who if our game shape remains solid we should be a reasonable chance against.
There are three other Asian sides left in the Cup, Japan, Philippines and Hong Kong. Our next goal is to go deeper into the knock out stage than those guys to earn hosting rights to next season's Asian Cup. Our squad is coming together nicely for next season and with home court I feel we should be confident of at least making the semi final stages and then we can dare to dream of making a World Cup.

The knock out stages have taken their toll on our older guys, with Ronnie Gibbins and Du Hongjing having squeezed every last drop of talent out of themselves and likely to be having a rest under their grandpa knee rugs unless something goes wrong with our line up from here.
Both have been absolute warriors for our squad for a long time, Hongjing finishing as the all time leading assist disher and the third highest scorer after 128 games in the green and gold. Gibbins finishes as our 12th highest rebounder of all time and 6th highest for blocks.
The next generation coming through have a slightly different look and feel to them to these two old school guys which will require some slightly different management and use, but based on current form things are looking bright.

We play japan at home at 7pm on Monday night - tune in and enjoy the ride as we push for a spot in the second round.

You’d know as well as anyone there’s still a lot of work to do, but it’s about the best position we could have placed ourselves in that was in our control. Cheers mate and good luck to you - but not too much!

We've made it through the first week of the knock out stages with what turned out to be a solid win over Japan, though in the early stages it was tight.
We have another tough game this week against Estonia and if we are fortunate enough to get through that one we will quite likely face the mighty Spanish team.
At this stage we are one of only two Asian teams left in the running, with Hong Kong knocking over Belgium in the first round.
Our next goal is clearly to stay alive longer than Hong Kong and earn Asian Cup hosting rights and from there cross our fingers and see how deep we can take this. Game shape will be a factor, we've already seen some good teams drop away in the opening round through an off week of game shape.

We're probably going to lose despite a big effort against Estonia, but Hong Kong lost to Finland earlier today so assuming it goes by round robin position we've got HCA next season.

Our run in the Consolation Cup came to an end this week - we just couldn't get past Estonia's three big guns despite a very solid effort defensively. Our shooting let us down to a certain extent an despite from heroic effort from Ian Bill on the boards we didn't really put up much of fight against their two salary monsters in the paint.

It's been a good run, though, winning eight straight games to make it to the second round of the knock out stage, which has earned us the right to host next season's Asian Cup. This was realistically our primary goal once we were knocked out of the repechage games to start this season so the work will start now to begin to develop a squad that can challenge for a place, initially in the semi finals and hopefully break through for our first World Cup appearance in some time.

In particularly I'll be on the look out for key inside players for the next few seasons to come so if you have a big man who is close to or has potential to be close to making the mark this season feel free to put him on my radar.

At this point we can formally say farewell to veterans Ronny Gibbins and Du Hongjing, who have officially played their last games for the national side. Gibbins was a work horse in the paint for us while Hongjing will go down as one of our most dominant guards at National level, ending his career as the all time assist leader and top 3 in scoring. most importantly for the team losing these two guys dints our experience out on the court, but it also will create opportunities for the next generation to push through.